I’m taking part in my company’s fantasy football league this year. And by taking part I mean I joined the group and deputized a friend of mine (who doesn’t work at the company) to handle putting players in and making trades and all that stuff that goes with it. I’m just in it for the trash talk.
Which isn’t strictly true. Over the past three months, I’ve osmosised some of how fantasy football works. You assemble a roster from various (American) football teams and as games are played over the week, players amass points by, well, doing what they’re supposed to do in a game of football. At the end, players’ points are tallied up and whichever (fantasy) team got the most points in a match-up wins. It’s a meta-game that’s uniquely tailored to the granular nature of American football, a game that takes forever and is so particular about its play that you can create a rubric so specific that there are different ways for a tight end and a running back to get points.
It’s, frankly, bizarre. A game where you calculate your team’s score based on disparate players’ individual performances and stats sounds closer to a Dungeons & Dragons variant than, y’know, sports ball. And yet, counting these numbers is wildly popular: USA Today wrote last year that over 29 million people were playing fantasy sports. Fantasy football: There are a lot of numbers and it’s a thing.
Last week, I found myself in a room with a football game playing and I realized three players of my fantasy team were playing. So I checked who they were, figuring out which players they were, what they were doing, and paid more attention to an (American) football game than I have in several years. Watching the game was different. It was less about the overall score and more about how those players were doing. When one of the players had to leave the field for a while I worried for my score, since he was one of the best players on my team. The game became markedly more interesting for me, maybe because there were actual (small, bragging-based) stakes for me, but also perhaps because I had a different way to watch it.
I’m still not much of a fan of (American) football, for a variety of reasons that are probably too inconsistent and weak to make an effective rant essay. I don’t think I’d take part in a fantasy league were it not for the folks I was playing with and the fun of being someone who barely knows anything having someone who knows more playing for him (a sporting Cyrano de Bergerac, if you will). But it is also fascinating, how a game with a measure of strategy and tactics can be played on top of a game already in progress. It’s like a gameplay mod for a video game, except instead of Grifball in Halo 3 it’s a game about seeing if Grifball is more popular than Fiesta. Then doing math based on that. And somehow, it works.
Essays, Not Rants! 